Add to Bookmarks A British poet and novelist, Victoria Sackville-West, or Vita as she was known, created with her husband Harold Nicholson one of the most famous gardens in the world at Sissinghurst in Kent. (Editor's Note: This article was originally published on May 12, 2010. Your comments are welcome, but please be aware that authors of previously published articles may not be able to respond to your questions.) Vita Sackville West was born on 9 March 1892 at Knole House in Kent which was built between 1456 and 1486. She was an only child. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the house came into the possession of Thomas Sackville from whom Vita is descended. Because of the laws regarding inheritance at that time, when her father the 3rd Baron Sackville died the house passed into the ownership of her uncle Charles. Vita was devastated by the loss of her childhood home and the pain of it remained with her throughout her life. Vita was a born writer, and wrote poems and ballads from an early age. 'Chatterton' was published privately when she was 17.

Her poems particularly 'The Land' express her closeness to the countryside. 'The Garden' won the Heinemann prize, and Vita famously used the prize money to buy azaleas for her garden. She also wrote 13 novels. At age 21 she married the diplomat Harold Nicolson, and despite both having numerous extra-marital affairs they remained devoted to each other until Vita died in 1962 and had two sons. Virginia Woolf used Vita as the inspiration for her novel Orlando. The couple bought Sissinghurst in 1930. A medieval manor farm existed on the site which progressed through many developments becoming an Elizabethan mansion where Her Majesty spent 3 nights in 1573 when it was owned by Sir Richard Baker who added the tower which still exists today. It is one of the first houses in Kent to be built of brick rather than stone and timber. In the 1600s the buildings became neglected. In 1756 it was leased to the Government as a prison during the Hundred Years War. The French prisoners suffered terribly in the dilapidated buildings and destroyed much of the house and furniture for firewood.

The farmhouse was built in 1855, and the estate was put up for sale in 1928. A buyer could not be found until Vita and Harold bought the estate which included 400 acres of farmland. When Vita and Harold bought Sissinghurst the garden was "muddled up in a tangle of bindweed, nettles and ground elder." When the task of clearing the rubbish away was done, a garden with large open spaces and beautiful walls was revealed. The Nuttery was one of the features of the garden that persuaded the Nicolsons to buy Sissinghurst, a symmetrical planting of hazelnuts which is underplanted in a green and yellow colour theme with Euphorbias, ferns and woodruff. The primroses which Vita grew have sadly died out. A stream was dammed to make a lake, and the moat wall was discovered beneath brambles. The remaining walls of the Tudor buildings allowed the garden to be planned as separate 'rooms' but it wasn't until 1933 that the first plantings could be made.

It was Harold who designed the structure of the gardens using strong classical elements in the paths, hedges and walls whilst Vita was responsible for the planting schemes. Neither was a professional gardener, and they learned through trial and error at the gardens they had at their previous homes at Long Barn and in Constantinople where Harold was based as a diplomat. Vita quickly laid claim to the tower which became her office and almost exclusive domain. Harold's design used the existing walls to create garden rooms and a sense of discovery and surprise is at the heart of the garden's layout. Vita's experiences in the garden gave her the belief that a not too tidy garden was not a bad thing, and she encouraged annuals which self-seeded among the garden beds. If a plant displeased her she was ruthless in replacing it. She was happy for the garden to have its own highlights, the lime walk and nuttery at their peak in Spring, the rose garden in which she planted a lot of old-fashioned roses was essentially a one-month garden in June. The purple border is obviously restricted to the blue and violet shades and similarly the white garden which uses strictly white, green and silver blooms all the year round.

The cottage garden uses mainly hot colours in yellow, orange and red and has an informal, relaxed feel. Many books and articles have been written about Sissinghurst garden and many visitors come from all over the world to see it. It has changed since Vita's day simply to accomodate the thousands of visitors, but the gardens remain pretty much as she and Harold designed them, although improved varieties have replaced some of Vita's plantings. Vita's experience as a gardener allowed her to write a weekly column for The Observer newspaper called 'In Your Garden' between 1947 and 1961. Some of her articles were collected and published in book form. Vita Sackville-West died in 1962. Grateful thanks for the use of the Sissinghurst garden photos to John Roger Palmour Vita Sackville-West: her gardening legacy - Telegraph Gardening Vita Sackville-West: her gardening legacy Vita Sackville-West died 50 years ago this month. What was it about her unique style that inspires gardeners today?

The gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent created by Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson Photo: JONATHAN BUCKLEY By Matthew Dennison Comments 'Gardening is surely an ideal profession for the woman who likes it. The work is not so heavy as to put too great a strain on her physical capacity; and in the more expert branches the possibilities and range of interest is really unlimited,” wrote writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West in The Women’s Land Army, published in 1944. For Sackville-West herself, who died 50 years ago this month at the age of 70, gardening was more than a profession. In her gardens at Long Barn and Sissinghurst Castle, both in Kent, she achieved a degree of aesthetic coherence which consistently eluded her in her fiction, with its tendency to melodrama and tempestuously heightened emotions. While her writing sought to imitate the human heart, in all its nuances and strangeness, in her gardening she captured a simpler, more straightforward love: the countrywoman’s love of the land and its husbandry, the artist’s love of form and colour. Today Vita’s name has become a kind of shorthand when applied to garden design.

She once defined her approach as “profusion, even extravagance and exuberance, within confines of the utmost linear severity”, and her style is characterised by abundant planting enhanced by self-seeding, a careful shading and blending of colours and a passion for roses, traits which later found echoes in the work of Rosemary Verey, among others. Self-taught, experimental, romantic but also ruthless in her approach, she was the ultimate amateur genius. Her gardening appears quintessentially “English”, one reason for Vita’s continuing international renown, particularly among American gardeners. It is not a modern vision, but as anyone who has read Vita’s gardening journalism will know, her thirsty relish for plants, for new discoveries and fresh introductions, would have imposed a degree of modernity on any garden she created. For Vita, writing and gardening arose from the same impulse, irresistible in both cases, an unstoppable urge. “My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,” she wrote in a poem published in 1921. If literary scholars deny her the status of great novelist or great poet, they cannot deny the immensity of the wellsprings of creative inspiration which seldom failed her.

Writing, like gardening, was a passion Vita cherished with the certainty of a vocation: her facility was enormous and never stalled. Over time the twin aspects of her artistry became increasingly entwined. In July 1907, the 15-year-old Vita recorded in her diary “the first money I have got through writing” — a prize of £1 for a competition set by Onlo oker to complete a limerick. Twenty-three years later, profits from her bestselling and still best-known novel The Edwardians paid for the damming of the stream which made the lake at Sissinghurst. Related Articles Smitten by Sissinghurst 16 Oct 2011 A love of gardening permeates Vita’s poetry, most notably her two long poems, “The Land” and “The Garden”; it also shapes her fiction.

In her 1934 novel The Dark Island, she resorted to horticultural metaphor: “Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment.” For 15 years, from 1946 to 1961, famous by then as the co-creator with her husband Harold Nicolson of the garden at Sissinghurst, Vita was a professional garden writer. Every Sunday morning, she sat down to write a column for the Observer. Although she would claim that the column filled her with loathing, it earned her legions of fans and the coveted Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. The Vita who emerges from her Observer columns, though practical in the soundness of her gardening advice, is a confirmed romantic in her approach to her favourite plants.

She likens Fritillaria imperialis, the crown imperial, to “the stiff, Gothic-looking flowers one sometimes sees growing along the bottom of a medieval tapestry” and recalls her first sight of the plant in its native Persia: “In the midst of this moist luxuriance I suddenly discerned a group of the noble flower. Its coronet of orange bells glowed like lanterns in the shadows in the mysterious place.” Plants for Vita were every bit as real as people: they had personalities, appealing and unappealing traits, physical attractions and elements of mystery. She once described a particularly exasperating member of her family as being “as floppy as an unstaked delphinium in a gale”. It was plants that she considered her own contribution to the garden at Sissinghurst — “the maximum informality in planting”. Her husband’s contribution, by contrast, was “the strictest formality of design”. For those millions of visitors who have travelled to Sissinghurst since the garden was first opened to the public on a single June weekend in 1938, Vita herself has become an archetype of the green-fingered aristocratic English chatelaine, “England’s rose queen”, as she was labelled by American journalists.

The truth is less simple and not nearly so sweet. Her mother, Lady Sackville, described Vita as “a beautiful mask”: the surface concealed unexpected secrets — hopes, anxieties and fears that were less beautiful. As Virginia Woolf, the most famous of her lovers, described Vita, “all about her is savage, patrician”. In her gardening, as in her writing, she found a channel for those “savage” impulses which arose specifically in response to one aspect of aristocratic life — Vita’s inability as a girl to inherit her family home of Knole. Knole, that sprawling Tudor palace in the Kentish greensward, set in 26 acres of garden within parkland reminiscent of the backdrop of a tapestry, was Vita’s childhood home and, as she freely admitted, even to her husband, the great love of her life. The only child of the third Lord Sackville and his exotic, illegitimate, part-Spanish wife Victoria, Vita spent a lonely childhood dreaming of those swashbuckling Sackville ancestors, whose portraits lined Knole’s galleries, and whose glamorous history shaped her identity.

Following her father’s death in 1928, Knole passed first to Vita’s uncle and afterwards her cousin. Her sense of exclusion from the house and those ancestral acres to which she felt connected as by “some sort of umbilical cord” was agonising. It never left her. Over and over again, her novels extol the special magic of genius loci, the spirit of a place. That place is invariably an inherited house and garden. At Sissinghurst, Vita ultimately recreated something of the spirit of Knole in miniature. But even so, Sissinghurst could never replace Knole in her heart. Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson, Norah Lindsay, Edwin Lutyens and Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote all influenced Vita’s gardening: today her reputation is as great if not greater than theirs. Yet her perceived legacy — Sissinghurst-inspired white gardens across the globe — is only part of the story. So, too, is her misappropriation by gardening snobs as an arbiter of all things tasteful in the garden. Vita’s vision was too big, too romantic and above all too personal for conventional notions of good taste.

Innovator and imitator, she created a garden at Sissinghurst that was both a statement of self-assertion and a means of rewriting her own history. At the end of her life, Vita described the process of writing fiction: “Ah, it is heavenly while it lasts. A sort of intoxication… You see suddenly, as in a finished picture, the entire shape and design of what you want to do. “I don’t say that you ever carry it out to your satisfaction, but for one brief moment of illumination you have apprehended the unity of what you meant. That is one of the few moments in life worth living.” Happily, half a century after her death, the intoxicating effect of Vita’s gardening vision at Sissinghurst, albeit changed and modified by those who have succeeded her, lasts and lasts. Matthew Dennison’s biography of Vita Sackville-West will be published by HarperCollins Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, nr Cranbrook, Kent, are closed Wed/Thurs.

For more information, see nationaltrust.org.uk In Your Garden: Amazon.co.uk: Vita Sackville-West: 9780711223547: Books In Your Garden Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Frances Lincoln; Reissue edition (1 April 2004) Language: English Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 14 x 2.3 cm Average Customer Review: Product Description Review ...

the best light reading on the topic to reappear this year are still the collections of newspaper articles by Vita Sackville West … They unite a literary turn with practical knowledge and a whimsical, inquiring mind and eye. I hope that no generation of new gardeners will grow up without reading such delights ... (Robin Lane Fox Financial Times) Seasonal, personal and ideas in spades (Country Life) Best for taking gardens into a different league - she made me see that gardening had links with the poetry and painting I loved. (Mary Keen BBC Gardens Illustrated) About the Author Vita Sackville-West is known as much for her creation of the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle with her husband Harold Nicolson as for her numerous novels, which include The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, her collections of poetry and her gardening articles. A central figure in the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers, she was the model for Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She died in 1962. What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item? By Julie D TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 4 Dec.

2013 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase I was delighted to find this little volume modestly priced on Amazon Warehouse recently. What is not made clear elsewhere is that it is a facsimile of a Michael Joseph publication from 1951. The book comprises Vita Sackville-West's very popular gardening articles for The Observer and the 1998 Oxenwood Press reprint I have contains many black and white photographs of the author's own garden - Sissinghurst. A big Vita enthusiast and an amateur gardener myself, I love reading her on gardening as so many aspects of her character come into play. She is by turns matter-of-fact, poetic, amusing, impecunious, defender of the common man and woman, elitist - very knowledgeable and extremely good at describing plants and their situations as one would expect of a writer of her calibre. The style is not so much redolent of the date of first publication, rather it betrays the author's Edwardian beginnings as it does appear rather antique even for 1951 - but it is anachronistic in a good way.

In these frequently anodine times, what a pleasure it is to meet with Vita's strong and definite ideas, her obvious enthusiasm for her subject combined with a great and surprising modesty permeating all. Vita speaks directly down the years to all gardeners; she remains my all-time favourite gardening writer. Curiously, given the extent to which Vita is so firmly fixed within an orbit of the privileged upper classes,she comes across as the most human of gardening writers - she draws the reader close, confides in them and longs to share the wonders and exasperations of trying to manage so unruly a thing as nature. The ideal present for a young female gardener, this is an informative and accessible volume by a writer who - it should not be forgotten - was commercially highly successful in her day, a most interesting woman and co-creator of arguably the best garden in England. Utterly gorgeous and very worth having.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden | National Trust Sissinghurst Castle Garden The colour changes daily through the autumn in the Sissinghurst Castle Garden Katie Shaw / National Trust Richly layered colours fill the garden in autumn at Sissinghurst Castle Garden Katie Shaw / National Trust Get a rare glimpse in to Harold Nicolson's book room from 1 November Katie Shaw / National Trust Walking through the Sissinghurst estate Sally Mackenzie An autumnal view of the garden from the top of the tower Kate Shaw Be sure to take a walk around the lakes when you visit National Trust / Sally Mackenzie Historic, poetic, iconic; a refuge dedicated to beauty. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson fell in love with Sissinghurst Castle and created a world renowned garden. International Garden Photographer of the Year Exhibition at Sissinghurst While the main garden is closed for conservation and preparation for spring, brighten up your winter with a visit to the International Garden Photographer of the Year Exhibition from 16 January - 5 March. We'll be showcasing some of the very best amateur and professional garden photography from across the world brought to life by the Sissinghurst gardeners using plants from the famous garden.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden Our work Take a look behind the scenes and find out what we are up to at Sissinghurst National Trust / Arnhel De Serra The work we do behind the scenes at Sissinghurst Castle Garden is very varied, from our rangers on the estate to gardeners and our house stewards with their conservation work in the castle. Places nearby Georgian house with literary associations Join Accessibility General From 1 November 2016 - 10 March 2017 the garden will be closed for the winter period for important conservation work and to allow the garden to rest. Access to The South Cottage is via narrow paths which may be slippery, please wear appropriate footwear. Dogs on leads are most welcome around the wider estate, but regrettably, are NOT allowed in the formal garden There's no picnicking in the formal gardens. You can picnic on the tables and benches on the veg garden, opposite visitor reception and around our estate Parking charge for non-National Trust members - £3 Cameras are welcome in the garden, but please leave your tripod or monopod at home There are many changes of levels, steps and slopes around the garden, please take care.

Water - please be aware that there are unfenced lakes, moat and ponds around our estate Family PLEASE NOTE: Our formal garden is inaccessible to pushchairs and buggies Water - please be aware that there are unfenced lakes, moat and ponds around our estate Baby back-carriers for loan available from visitor reception Baby-changing facilities Children's quiz/trail available from visitor reception There's no picnicking in the formal gardens. You can picnic on the tables and benches opposite visitor reception and around our estate There are many changes of levels, steps and slopes around the garden, please take care. Accessibility From 1 November 2016 - 10 March 2017 the garden will be closed for the winter period for important conservation work and to allow the garden to rest. Access to the South Cottage is via narrow paths which may be slippery, please wear appropriate footwear. Unfortunately the cottage is not accessible for disabled visitors. Designated disabled parking in the main car park Drop-off points for the mobility buggy are from car park to the visitor reception and the shop Water - please be aware that there are unfenced lakes, moat and ponds around our estate There are many changes of levels, steps and slopes around the garden, please take care.

Adapted toilet on level ground at visitor reception and via ramp at restaurant Wheelchair users might find some areas of our garden challenging due to uneven paths and steps There's restricted access to the lower portion of our main shop, please speak to our staff who can help Sissinghurst Castle Garden Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West's lavish approach to gardening - Telegraph Gardens to Visit Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West's lavish approach to gardening For a decade Sarah Raven lived at Sissinghurst with her family, surrounded by the work of Vita Sackville-West. In a new book, she celebrates the designer’s vision and enduring prose Retreat: Vita Sackville-West wrote in her study at Sissinghurst Photo: Jonathan Buckley By Sarah Raven Comments The surprising thing about Vita’s writing is just how fresh it is, 70 years on. She described exactly what she loved and saw in the garden. She’s amazingly unpretentious, always thinking how readers could take ideas home. She was never mean, in either sense: sometimes disparaging about plants she did not like, but generous in other ways. Above all, I have come to love that quality in her: the fullness.

It’s as if she wanted her garden to be a really good party, but never coarse or losing its fineness. The garden is a symphony, not a brass band, and absolutely alive. That’s why I wrote the book. The extract below is from chapter six: “Cram, Cram, Cram”. In her planting, the filling and flowering up of her spaces, Vita had a clear and individual style. It is “Cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny,” she wrote on May 15 1955. At Sissinghurst you have plants trained over almost every square inch of wall; and where there’s a gap, Vita encourages plants to grow in the walls. As she says of herself, “My liking for gardens to be lavish is an inherent part of my garden philosophy. I like generosity wherever I find it, whether in gardens or elsewhere. I hate to see things scrimp and scrubby. Even the smallest garden can be prodigal within its own limitations… Always exaggerate rather than stint.

Masses are more effective than mingies.” You’ll see this clearly in the photographs of both Long Barn and Sissinghurst from the Thirties until the Sixties, a great profusion, a shagginess, a relaxedness, a softness to almost every hard surface, path, wall or step, as well as all the borders filled to overbrimming. Just the man for the greatest job in gardening 06 May 2013 As the garden writer Anne Scott-James put it, “She planned for rich planting and thick underplanting… the whole garden to be furnished with a lavish hand.” Lavish is only partly it – it’s also about embroidery and lace and nearly an old-ladyish sort of delicacy. Lavish display: the white garden (ALAMY) Go for it, overwhelm with plants, was a keystone of Vita’s Sissinghurst. Don’t plant just one of something – seven or nine, or even 600 would be better if you can find the money and the room. She liked exaggeration: “Big groups, big masses; I am sure that it is more effective to plant 12 tulips together than to split them into two groups of six”.

Pam and Sybille, Vita’s head gardeners who remained after her death, took this one step further in their continuing development of the garden in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. They would create a strong group of five or seven of one plant on one side of the path and then repeat it in a lesser group on the other. What Vita and then the gardeners were avoiding was the staccato look of dotting singly or in tiny groups, which gave a fussy feel. “The more I see of other people’s gardens the more convinced do I become of the value of good grouping and shapely training,” she declared in In Your Garden Again. “These remarks must necessarily apply most forcibly to gardens of a certain size, where sufficient space is available for large clumps or for large specimens of individual plants, but even in a small garden the spotty effect can be avoided by massing instead of dotting plants here and there.” Cover the walls I think Sissinghurst – more than any garden I have seen – uses the vertical as much as the horizontal, every surface brimming over. This is obviously due partly to the number of walls they inherited from the ruined Elizabethan palace.

As Vita said in a letter to Harold Nicolson [her husband] in 1930, “I see that we are going to have heaps of wall space for climbing things.” But Vita really went for it, planting the soft-coloured terracotta with hundreds of climbers: roses, clematis, hydrangeas, wisterias. She wanted “a tumble of roses and honeysuckle, figs and vines. It was a romantic place, and, within the austerity of Harold’s straight lines, must be romantically treated.” As she says, “Climbers are among the most useful plants. They take up little ground space, and can be employed for many purposes: to clothe a fence, to scramble over a dead tree, to frame an archway, to drape a wall, to disguise a shed, or to climb lightly into a pergola. They demand relatively little attention, once they have taken hold of their support, maybe a yearly pruning or a rescue if they have come adrift in a gale.” This theme has been built on by gardeners at Sissinghurst ever since.

The cottage garden at Sissinghurst (JONATHAN BUCKLEY) She’d put lots of climbers and wall shrubs against the house at Long Barn, and wanted even more at Sissinghurst. She admitted she had more walls to cover than most, but “any garden, however small, has a house in it, and that house has walls. This is an important fact to be remembered. Often I hear people say, 'How lucky you are to have these old walls; you can grow anything against them,’ and then, when I point out that every house means at least four walls – they say, 'I never thought of that.’ Against the north and west sides you can grow magnolias or camellias; on the east side, which catches the morning sun, you can grow practically any of the hardy shrubs or climbers, from the beautiful ornamental quinces, commonly, though incorrectly, called japonicas (the right name is cydonia, or even more correctly, chaenomeles), to the robust varieties of ceanothus, powdery-blue, or a blue fringing on purple.

On the south side the choice is even larger – a vine, for instance, will soon cover a wide, high space, and in a reasonable summer will ripen its bunches of small, sweet grapes (I recommend 'Royal Muscadine’); or, if you want a purely decorative effect, Solanum crispum will reach the eaves of the house and flower in deep mauve for at least two months in early summer.” The appearance of woody climbers – figs, wisterias and osmanthus, pruned flat against the shelter of the red brick and around the windows – is fundamental to the character of Sissinghurst, but Vita did not leave it at this. She had lots of other ideas, and a particular passion for climbing and rambler roses, but these were given only the lightest prune. This was partly because she hated to destroy the birds’ nests in them, but partly because she loved the swaths.

Harold complained in a letter: “I suppose one must take for granted this bird’s-nest passion… I will have to resign myself to my home being an omelette most of the spring and a guano dump the rest of the time.” She liked the wayward growth of yews, not wanting them tightly clipped. She loved shrub roses billowing or even tangling over your head; tall roses – like 'Nevada’ – tower right at the edge of the path, columns of shrubs almost obscuring them. Roses were to her a “wildly blossoming shrub” and that’s how they should be grown. VITA'S TOP SHRUBS AND CLIMBERS For a south wall Abutilon megapotamicum Indigoferas Solanum crispum var.

autumnalis, “useful in August – a trifle tender, perhaps, wanting a warm south wall” Solanum jasminoides, white, “another August flowerer, a most graceful climber, also a trifle tender but well worth trying in southern counties” Vine 'Royal Muscadine’ Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst Castle | Historic England Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst Castle Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst Castle Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) and Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, Registered Grade I. Vita Sackville-West was both a writer - poet, novelist, and biographer - and a gardener. She had a regular gardening column in The Observer. Her garden at Sissinghurst is one of the most admired and influential English gardens of the 20th century and in 1955 she was awarded the gold Veitch medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. Sissinghurst Castle Garden Created on a medieval moated site around surviving brick buildings and park of the 16th century, Sissinghurst garden was a collaboration between Vita and her husband Sir Harold Nicolson.

Harold is credited with designing the formal structure of the garden's separate enclosures, or 'succession of intimacies' as he described them, and Vita with the exuberant planting. The enclosures, often linked by vistas, include a Rose Garden, Cottage Garden, Herb Garden and the White Garden. Sissinghurst was a showcase for small gardens as each separate garden enclosure was on a small scale and so appealing to amateur gardeners. The White Garden is cruciform in plan and is divided into geometric compartments by a pattern of low box hedges and flagged or brick paths. The compartments are abundantly planted with flowers and foliage of predominantly grey, white or silver and include lilies, roses, white tulips, foxgloves, dahlias and Solomon's Seal. Clipped yew hedges enclose the small rectangular Herb Garden laid out by Vita in 1938, with square beds separated by narrow paths. Sages, thyme, hyssop, fennel and a camomile seat all feature. In the Cottage Garden a path of paving stones and bricks leads to the central feature, a large planted copper guarded by four Irish yews.

The abundant planting around the paths is concentrated on the warm shades of red, yellow, and orange. The garden is now owned by the National Trust. Vita Sackville-West (source Wikimedia Commons) Was this page helpful? Book review: Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden, By Vita Sackville-West and Sarah Raven; Gardens of the British Working Class By Margaret Willes | The Independent Book review: Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden, By Vita Sackville-West and Sarah Raven; Gardens of the British Working Class By Margaret Willes Sunday 23 March 2014 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture You might assume that Margaret Willes’s history of British working class gardening and Sarah Raven’s posh new outing to Sissinghurst would be breaking out into fisticuffs if placed side-by-side on the same shelf.

Willes’s book is a careful scholarly consideration of the evidence about Britain’s humblest plots, from medieval times onwards, where Sarah Raven’s is a rather glossier book about one of England’s most privileged gardeners, who embarked on the restoration of a former castle in 1930, just as the country was suffering the worst depression of the 20th century. Willes’s new book follows her 2011 success, The Making of the English Gardener, which focused on the ordinary horticulturalist in Elizabethan and Stuart times. According to her introduction, when Willes announced her plan to write about working-class gardens, she was most often asked: “Do you mean allotments?” Demonstrating how very little we know generally about the variety of ways in which working-class people in Britain gardened. Willes has worked tirelessly to amass evidence, and the illustrations and images included in the text are particularly evocative, and often also very poignant: Edwardian postcards, medieval maps, Seventies Tower Hamlets balconies, and a haunting image of a Mrs Dyble of Blackfriars Road, in 1939, tending her “glasshouse garden” on the roof of a factory.

Willes has tracked down diaries, newspaper articles, reports from government inquiries, and autobiographies, all of which provide the book’s rich texture and make for delightful and often surprising reading. So, a “History from Below”? Yes. Yet inevitably, a lot of Willes’s evidence comes not from working-class gardeners themselves, but from possibly helpful, possibly meddling middle-class sorts, determined to improve the lot of the downtrodden. Horticultural newspapers and political campaigns alike need to be treated with caution as evidence of working-class attitudes. Again, unavoidably, there is more in the book about nurserymen, park keepers and head gardeners – the male working class “made good” – than about the tantalising Mrs Dybles, making gardens in transient, unsanctioned spaces. In contrast, uptown girl Sarah Raven, the well-respected garden and cookery writer, takes on Vita, the glamorous grandmother of her husband Adam Nicholson. Raven first went to Sissinghurst for a party and ended up living there: her book is full of evocative details of life in inherited space among someone else’s objects, walls and plants – sleeping in Vita’s own bed, pruning her roses.

And the book itself is a sort of mutant family effort, quoting huge chunks from Vita’s own garden columns with overlain commentary by Raven. “Lavish” is the keyest of Vita’s key words here, and Raven does an elegant job of deconstructing in detail the Sissinghurst planting style that resulted, with many shrubs and few herbaceous plants. Vita’s bugbear was anything that smacked of a “Scrimp” or a “Stint”: “There’s nothing stingy about roses,” she wrote, of a plant she loved passionately. The initial purchase of Sissinghurst Castle and its adjacent 500-acre farm certainly required an unstingy sum; as did the consequent frequent massive orders from Hilliers Nursery. But despite the impression of conspicuous consumption, Raven’s book also quietly reveals the more complicated story behind the apparent ease of inherited wealth. Sissinghurst is built between the remaining walls of an Elizabethan castle, but it served time in the Seven Years’ War as a prisoner-of-war camp; became the local parish workhouse; and was latterly used as a rubbish tip: the Nicholsons excavated both ploughshares and bedsteads in their efforts to create useable flowerbeds.

And Vita was deeply influenced by the garden philosophy of William Robinson, author of the Victorian bestseller The Wild Garden, who wrote approvingly, if possibly inaccurately, of the “happy-go-lucky gardens of poor cottagers”. So did working-class gardeners contribute to grander designs? Margaret Willes argues that the compartment style of “garden rooms”, seen at Sissinghurst and its famous contemporary, Hidcote, owed much to the cottage garden. For me, though, this smells more of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens touring the Surrey lanes in a pony cart with a picnic, searching for “the vernacular”, than of real give-and-take. So Vita Sackville-West and Britain’s working class might seem at first glance to have little in common. Almost oppositional, you could even venture. Yet both books, in a way, show how determined people can be in pursuit of greater colour and richness in life. Margaret Willes includes a black and white photograph from a Bournville Trust report of 1941, showing a working-class woman in a Birmingham back alley, with long planting boxes mounted on the walls of her house, plants climbing up to the first floor windows.

It is difficult to look at Sissinghurst, after seeing this tiny, beautiful and lavish garden, and see any difference in their makers’ desires, other than scale. Vita Sackville-West | SISSINGHURST GARDEN SISSINGHURST GARDEN by sissinghurstntblog under Garden Projects For those of you who read our blog regularly, you will probably have guessed that the new nursery area has opened up a whole range of new possibilities and opportunities for us as gardeners. We have already written about our enlarged and improved cutting garden as well as the new iris stock bed that will be so important in safeguarding our collection for the future. Now we are venturing forth into the world of plant trials. We have always trialled new plants in the nursery but have never had the space to do this on a large scale. Individual plants have been planted out in the nursery for a year or even two to assess their flower colour, size and overall vigour before deciding whether they are worthy of a place in the main garden.

Now we are able to consider running trials where several cultivars of the same plant are assessed side by side and this will enable us to make more considered choices, learning more about each cultivar before making decisions. The Nursery from the Tower, July 2015 The Nursery from the Tower, March 2015 The new iris stock bed; July 2015 An empty space just waiting to be filled! Trials at Sissinghurst can, essentially, be divided into two groups. The first types are those which are run by RHS where plants are assessed using a rigorous set of criteria with a view to deciding whether they should be awarded an Award of Garden Merit (or lose an Award of Garden Merit). Most trials are run at Wisley and judges gather every few months to judge the plants using the criteria set at the beginning of the trial. Each trial usually runs for at least three years so that plants can be assessed over several growing seasons. RHS trials can also be held in other locations around the country so that plants can be grown in alternative environments and therefore, their performance judged more thoroughly.

It is one such trial that we will be taking part in later in the year and Troy, our Head Gardener will write about this in more detail later in the year. The second type of trial that we can create as gardeners are those where we set own criteria in order to assess plants for a particular purpose. We are running two ‘in house’ trials this year with zinnias and delphiniums being the plants under scrutiny. The delphiniums are simply being grown on in pots this year and the trial will properly start next year but the zinnia trial is well under way. The zinnia trial bed Zinnia elegans ‘Luminosa’ The zinnia trial bed Vita wrote about zinnias in one of her Observer articles, “It is only half-hardy in this country, and thus has to be sown in a seed box under glass in February or March; pricked out; and then planted out in May where we want it to flower. We will have to be very careful not to water the seedlings too much, or they will damp off and die. On the other hand, we must never let the grown plant suffer from drought.

Then, when we have planted it out, we have to be on the look-out for slugs which have for zinnias an affection greatly exceeding our own. Why should we take all this trouble about growing any flower which we know is going to be cut down by the first autumn frost?” and “… For there are few flowers more brilliant without being crude, and since they are sun-lovers the maximum of light will pour on the formal heads and the array of colours.” Zinnia ‘Wine Bouquet’ Zinnia ‘Wine Bouquet’ Zinnia ‘Wine Bouquet’ The advantage of this type of trial is that it can be very specific in its criteria for assessment. For example, the zinnias are being assessed for potential planting in the Moat Walk as we know that Vita once grew them here. Therefore, their colour is the most important factor we are assessing although other factors such as their height, width and ability to grow without support are also important. We will also consider the number of flowers produced, how many side shoots each plant has, how weather resistant it proves to be and our propagator, Emma will assess germination rates.

We chose 10 cultivars (‘Wine Bouquet’, ‘Benary’s Giant White’, ‘Benary’s Giant Scarlet’, ‘Benary’s Giant Wine’, ‘Benary’s Giant Lime’, ‘Envy’, ‘Polar Bear’, ‘Luminosa’, ‘Purple Prince’ and ‘Queen Red Lime’) and planted 12 of each. All the plants are now flowering and we will need to observe and discuss them to draw our conclusions. An informal trial such as this can be so useful as it can be relatively small scale whilst allowing us the opportunity to compare foliage and flowers side by side. It’s unlikely that the zinnias will be planted until 2017 and therefore, we have the time to run a two year trial. The advantage of this is that only the zinnias assessed to be potential candidates for the Moat Walk will move forward to the 2nd year and if we find other zinnias that might be suitable we can add them to the trial. In year 2 we will also try to find a location within the Nursery that offers conditions very similar to the Moat Walk so that we can really observe how the plants cope with the stresses of this location.

Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant Scarlet’ Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant White’ Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant Scarlet’ Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant White’ There is a book, Dearest Andrew, letters from V’. Sackville-West to Andrew Reiber 1951-1962 about the correspondence of Vita Sackville-West with Andrew Reiber. They wrote letters to each other from 1951 until her death in 1962. On December 27 1951 Vita wrote to Andrew “I am going to ask a favour of you. I hope you won’t mind: I feel pretty sure you won’t. It is something I covet passionately for my garden. It is a packet of seeds –Bodger’s Zinnias- the stripy ones. The seed is unobtainable here, and it is the envy of every gardener. The American firm called Bodgers sell them –so I imagine that you could easily buy a packet of seed and post it to me.

I can’t send you any money to pay for them, because we are not allowed to send money out of this country, but I can get some American stamps, and I will send you those- and if you would really get me a packet of seed I would grow them in your honour.” Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant Wine’ Zinnia ‘Purple Prince’ Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant Wine’ Zinnia ‘Purple Prince’ He almost immediately bought some seed from Burnett Brothers in New York and mailed them to Vita. Within ten days of her original request reaching Andrew, Vita had possession of a quarter-ounce of Bodgers Peppermint Stick Zinnias. Andrew’s several requests to seed companies resulted in the arrival of another package on Vita’s doorstep on February 14. The happy coincidence of the date was to make the observation of Valentine’s day a special holiday for Andrew and Vita. Vita wrote “Another great huge packet of seed! How marvellous–and how kind of you. I am now planning to have a whole border (narrow, but very long) entirely filled with your zinnias.

The narrow but very long border in which Vita planted the zinnias was the border in front of the Moat Walk wall. On July 31, 1955 Vita wrote to Andrew “Your zinnias are looking grand. They are all along the foot of a wall with Morning Glory clambering behind them”. Zinnia elegans ‘Polar Bear’ Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant Lime’ Zinnia elegans ‘Polar Bear’ In 1954 he inquired if he might add some other varieties of zinnia to the packet of ‘Andrew zinnias’. Vita replied “Blaze sounds lovely and as I have an orange-red garden it would be perfect. I like any of the Burpee ones, -Persian Carpet or Fantasy, for instance. Not white, since I can get those here.” Zinnia ‘Queen Red Lime’ Zinnia ‘Queen Red Lime’ Zinnia elegans ‘Envy’ In many ways zinnias may seem a strange choice to trial but from the correspondence we know that Vita clearly liked these bold flowers and was experienced in growing them.

In her Observer article on February 12 1950 she wrote ‘Some people do not like zinnias: they think them stiff and artificial looking. But they are surely no more artificial-looking than dahlias … and their colours are even more subtle than the colours of the dahlia. In zinnias, you get a mixture of colours seldom seen in any other flower: straw-colour, greenish-white, a particular saffron-yellow, a dusky rose-pink, a coral-pink…. Personally I like them higgledy-piggledy, when they look like those pats of paint squeezed out upon the palette, and I like them all by themselves, not associated with anything else.’ When our trial finally concludes in 2017, I hope that we will be able to report that zinnias will once more be growing in the Moat Walk. Helen Champion and Monique Wolak

Question: At which site did Vita Sackville-West create her 'White Garden'?
Answer: SISSINGHURST